About this painting

This original one-off painting is based on a photo that Gillian took of a child in a school in Peru. It combines Gillian’s love for capturing portraits in an almost life-like style with her more recent experiments with abstract style and typical earthy palette. To create this piece, Gillian firstly developed different colours and textures in the background using a variety of mark-making tools including sponges, palette knives, brushes and card with acrylic. She then used brushes to carefully encourage the face and hands to emerge from the background, before finally bringing using brushwork and palette knives along with other tools such as string and stencils to create layers and pull the image together.